Tag: scrum

The scrum framework is forever tied to the language of sports in general and rugby in particular. We organize our project work around goals, sprints, points, and daily scrums. An unfortunate consequence of organizing projects around a sports metaphor is that the language of gaming ends up driving behavior. For example, people have a natural inclination to associate the idea of story points to a measure of success rather than an indicator of the effort required to complete the story. The more points you have, the more successful you are. This is reflected in an actual quote from a retrospective on things a team did well:

We completed the highest number of points in this sprint than in any other sprint so far.

This was a team that lost sight of the fact they were the only team on the field. They were certain to be the winning team. They were also destine to be he losing team. They were focused on story point acceleration rather than a constant, predictable velocity.

More and more I’m finding less and less value in using story points as an indicator for level of effort estimation. If Atlassian made it easy to change the label on JIRA’s story point field, I’d change it to “Fuzzy Bunnies” just to drive this idea home. You don’t want more and more fuzzy bunnies, you want no more than the number you can commit to taking care of in a certain span of time typically referred to as a “sprint.” A team that decides to take on the care and feeding of 50 fuzzy bunnies over the next two weeks but has demonstrated – sprint after sprint – they can only keep 25 alive is going to lose a lot of fuzzy bunnies over the course of the project.

It is difficult for people new to scrum or Agile to grasp the purpose behind an abstract idea like story points. Consequently, they are unskilled in how to use them as a measure of performance and improvement. Developing this skill can take considerable time and effort. The care and feeding of fuzzy bunnies, however, they get. Particularly with teams that include non-technical domains of expertise, such as content development or learning strategy.

A note here for scrum masters. Unless you want to exchange your scrum master stripes for a saddle and spurs, be wary of your team turning story pointing into an animal farm. Sizing story cards to match the exact size and temperament from all manner of animals would be just as cumbersome as the sporting method of story points. So, watch where you throw your rope, Agile cowboys and cowgirls.

In Part 1 of this series, we set the frame for how to use time as a metric for assessing Agile team and project health. In Part 2, we looked at shifts in the cross-over point between burn-down and burn-up charts. In Part 3, we’ll look at other asymmetries and anomalies that can appear in time burn-down/burn-up charts and explore the issues the teams may be struggling with under these circumstances.

Figure 1 shows a burn-up that by the end of the sprint significantly exceeded the starting value for the original estimate.

Figure 1

There isn’t much mystery around a chart like this. The time needed to complete the work was significantly underestimated. The mystery is in the why and what that led to this situation.

Depending on the tools used to capture team metrics, it can be helpful to look at individual performances. What’s the differential between story points and estimated time vs actual time for each team member? Hardly every useful as a disciplinary tool, this type of analysis can be invaluable for knowing who needs professional development and in what areas.

In this case, there were several technical challenges related to new elements of the underlying architecture and the team put in extra hours to resolve them. Even so, they were unable to complete all the work they committed to in the sprint. The the scrum master and product owner need to monitor this so it isn’t a recurrent event or they risk team burnout and morale erosion if left unchecked. There are likely some unstated dependencies or skill deficiencies that need to be put on the table for discussion during the retrospective.

Figure 2 shows, among other things, unexpected jumps in the burn-down chart. There is clearly a significant amount of thrashing evident in the burn-down (which stubbornly refuses to actually burn down.)

Figure 2

Questions to explore:

Are cards being brought into the sprint after the sprint has started and why?

Are original time estimates being changed on cards after the sprint has started?

Is there a stakeholder in the grass, meddling with the team’s commitment?

Was a team member added to the team and cards brought into the sprint to accommodate the increased bandwidth?

Whatever is causing the thrashing, is the team (delivery team members, scrum master, and product owner) aware of the changes?

Scope change during a sprint is a very undesirable practice. Not just because it goes against the scrum framework, but more so because it almost always has an adverse effect on team morale and focus. If there is an addition to the team, better to set that person to work helping teammates complete the work already defined in the sprint and assign them cards in the next sprint.

If team members are adjusting original time estimates for “accuracy” or whatever reason they may provide, this is little more than gaming the system. It does more harm than good, assuming management is Agile savvy and not intent on using Agile metrics for punitive purposes. On occasion I’ve had to hide the original time estimate entry field from the view of delivery team members and place it under the control of the product owner – out of sight, out of mind. It’s less a concern to me that time estimates are “wrong,” particularly if time estimate accuracy is showing improvement over time or the delta is a somewhat consistent value. I can work with an delivery team member’s time estimates that are 30% off if they are consistently 30% off.

In the case of Figure 2 it was the team’s second sprint and at the retrospective the elephant was called out from hiding: The design was far from stable. The decision was made to set aside scrum in favor of using Kanban until the numerous design issues could be resolved.

Figure 3 shows a burn-down chart that doesn’t go to zero by the end of the sprint.

Figure 3

The team missed their commit and quite a few cards rolled to the next sprint. Since the issue emerged late in the sprint there was little corrective action that could be taken. The answers were left to discovery during the retrospective. In this case, one of the factors was the failure to move development efforts into QA until late in the sprint. This is an all too common issue in cases where the sprint commitments were not fully satisfied. For this team the QA issue was exacerbated by the team simply taking on more than they thought they could commit to completing. The solution was to reduce the amount of work the team committed to in subsequent sprints until a stable sprint velocity emerged.

Conclusion

For a two week sprint on a project that is 5-6 sprints in, I usually don’t bother looking at time burn-down/burn-up charts for the first 3-4 days. Early trends can be misleading, but by the time a third of the sprint has been completed this metric will usually start to show trends that suggest any emergent problems. For new projects or for newly formed teams I typically don’t look at intra-sprint time metrics until much later in the project life cycle as there are usually plenty of other obvious and more pressing issues to work through.

I’ll conclude by reiterating my caution that these metrics are yard sticks, not micrometers. It is tempting to read too much into pretty graphs that have precise scales. Rather, the expert Agilest will let the metrics, whatever they are, speak for themselves and work to limit the impact of any personal cognitive biases.

In this series we’ve explored several ways to interpret the signals available to us in estimated time burn-down and actual time burn-up charts. There are numerous others scenarios that can reveal important information from such burn-down/burn-up charts and I would be very interested in hearing about your experiences with using this particular metric in Agile environments.

In Part 1 of this series, we set the frame for how to use time as a metric for assessing Agile team and project health. In Part 2, we’ll look at shifts in the cross-over point between burn-down and burn-up charts and explore what issues may be in play for the teams under these circumstances.

Figure 1 shows a cross-over point occurring early in the sprint.

Figure 1

This suggests the following questions:

Is the team working longer hours than needed? If so, what is driving this effort? Are any of the team members struggling with personal problems that have them working longer hours? Are they worried they may have committed to more work than they can complete in the sprint and are therefore trying to stay ahead of the work load? Has someone from outside the team requested additional work outside the awareness of the product owner or scrum master?

Has the team over estimated the level of effort needed to complete the cards committed to the sprint? If so, this suggests an opportunity to coach the team on ways to improve their estimating or the quality of the story cards.

Has the team focused on the easy story cards early in the sprint and work on the more difficult story cards is pending? This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just something to know and be aware of after confirming this with the team. If accurate, it also points out the importance of using this type of metric for intra-sprint monitoring only and not extrapolate what it shows to a project-level metric.

The answer to these questions may not become apparent until later in the sprint and the point isn’t to try and “correct” the work flow based on relatively little information. In the case of Figure 1, the “easy” cards had been sized as being more difficult than they actually were. The more difficult cards were sized too small and a number of key dependencies were not identified prior to the sprint planning session. This is reflected in the burn-up line that significantly exceeds the initial estimate for the sprint, the jumps in the burn-down line, and subsequent failure to complete a significant portion of the cards in the sprint backlog. All good fodder for the retrospective.

Figure 2 shows a cross-over point occurring late in the sprint.

Figure 2

On the face of it there are two significant stretches of inactivity. Unless you’re dealing with a blatantly apathetic team, there is undoubtedly some sort of activity going on. It’s just not being reflected in the work records. The task is to find out what that activity is and how to mitigate it.

The following questions will help expose the cause for the extended periods of apparent inactivity:

Are one or more members not feeling well or are there other personal issues impacting an individual’s ability to focus?

Have they been poached by another project to work on some pressing issue?

Are they waiting for feedback from stakeholders, clients, or other team members?

Are the story cards unclear? As the saying goes, story cards are an invitation to a conversation. If a story card is confusing, contradictory, or unclear than the team needs to talk about that. What’s unclear? Where’s the contradiction? As my college calculus professor used to ask when teaching us how to solve math problems, “Where’s the source of the agony?”

The actual reasons behind Figure 2 were two fold. There was a significant technical challenge the developers had to resolve that wasn’t sufficiently described by any of the cards in the sprint and later in the sprint several key resources were pulled off the project to deal with issues on a separate project.

Figure 3 shows a similar case of a late sprint cross-over in the burn-down/burn-up chart. The reasons for this occurrence were quite different than those shown in Figure 2.

Figure 3

This was an early sprint and a combination of design and technical challenges were not as well understood as originally thought at the sprint planning session. As these issues emerged, additional cards were created in the product backlog to be address in future sprints. Nonetheless, the current sprint commitment was missed by a significant margin.

In Part 3, we’ll look at other asymmetries and anomalies that can appear in time burn-down/burn-up charts and explore the issues may be in play for the teams under these circumstances.

Some teams choose to use card level estimated and actual time as one of the level of effort or performance markers for project progress and health. For others it’s a requirement of the work environment due to management or business constraints. If your situation resembles one of these cases then you will need to know how to use time metrics responsibly and effectively. This series of articles will establish several common practices you can use to develop your skills for evaluating and leveraging time-based metrics in an Agile environment.

It’s important to keep in mind that time estimates are just one of the level of effort or performance markers that can be used to track team and project health. There can, and probably should be other markers in the overall mix of how team and project performance is evaluated. Story points, business value, quality of information and conversation from stand-up meetings, various product backlog characteristics, cycle time, and cumulative flow are all examples of additional views into the health and progress of a project.

In addition to using multiple views, it’s important to be deeply aware of the strengths and limits presented by each of them. The limits are many while the strengths are few. Their value comes in evaluating them in concert with one another, not in isolation. One view may suggest something that can be confirmed or negated by another view into team performance. We’ll visit and review each of these and other metrics after this series of posts on time.

The examples presented in this series are never as cut and dried as presented. Just as I previously described multiple views based on different metrics, each metric can offer multiple views. My caution is that these views shouldn’t be read like an electrocardiogram, with the expectation of a rigidly repeatable pattern from which a slight deviation could signal a catastrophic event. The examples are extracted from hundreds of sprints and dozens of projects over the course of many years and are more like seismology graphs – they reveal patterns over time that are very much context dependent.

Estimated and actual time metrics allow teams to monitor sprint progress by comparing time remaining to time spent. Respectively, this will be a burn-down and a burn-up chart in reference to the direction of the data plotted on the chart. In Figure 1, the red line represents the estimated time remaining (burn-down) while the green line represents the amount of time logged against the story cards (burn-up) over the course of a two week sprint. (The gray line is a hypothetical ideal for burn-down.)

Figure 1

The principle value of a burn-down/burn-up chart for time is the view it gives to intra-sprint performance. I usually look at this chart just prior to a teams’ daily stand-up to get a sense if there are any questions I need to be asking about emerging trends. In this series of posts we’ll explore several of the things to look for when preparing for a stand-up. At the end of the sprint, the burn-down/burn-up chart can be a good reference to use during the retrospective when looking for ways to improve.

The sprint shown in Figure 1 is about as ideal a picture as one can expect. It shows all the points I look for that tell me, insofar as time is concerned, the sprint performance is in good health.

There is a cross-over point roughly in the middle of the sprint.

At the cross-over point about half of the estimated time has been burned down.

The burn-down time is a close match to the burn-up at both the cross-over point and the end of the sprint.

The burn-down and burn-up lines show daily movement in their respective directions.

In Part 2, we’ll look at several cases where the cross-over point shifts and explore the issues the teams under these circumstances might be struggling with.

Conceptually, the idea of a minimum viable product (MVP) is easy to grasp. Early in a project, it’s a deliverable that reflects some semblance to the final product such that it’s barely able to stand on it’s own without lots of hand-holding and explanation for the customer’s benefit. In short, it’s terrible, buggy, and unstable. By design, MVPs lack features that may eventually prove to be essential to the final product. And we deliberately show the MVP to the customer!

We do this because the MVP is the engine that turns the build-measure-learn feedback loop. The key here is the “learn” phase. The essential features to the final product are often unclear or even unknown early in a project. Furthermore, they are largely undefinable or unknowable without multiple iterations through the build-measure-learn feedback cycle with the customer early in the process.

So early MVPs aren’t very good. They’re also not very expensive. This, too, is by design because an MVP’s very raison d’être is to test the assumptions we make early on in a project. They are low budget experiments that follow from a simple strategy:

State the good faith assumptions about what the customer wants and needs.

Describe the tests the MVP will satisfy that are capable of measuring the MVP’s impact on the stated assumptions.

Build an MVP that tests the assumptions.

Evaluate the results.

If the assumptions are not stated and the tests are vague, the MVP will fail to achieve it’s purpose and will likely result in wasted effort.

The “product” in “minimum viable product” can be almost anything: a partial or early design flow, a wireframe, a collection of simulated email exchanges, the outline to a user guide, a static screen mock-up, a shell of screen panels with placeholder text that can nonetheless be navigated – anything that can be placed in front of a customer for feedback qualifies as an MVP. In other words, a sprint can contain multiple MVPs depending on the functional groups involved with the sprint and the maturity of the project. As the project progresses, the individual functional group MVPs will begin to integrate and converge on larger and more refined MVPs, each gaining in stability and quality.

MVPs are not an end unto themselves. They are tangible evidence of the development process in action. The practice of iteratively developing MVPs helps develop to skill of rapid evaluation and learning among product owners and agile delivery team members. A buggy, unstable, ugly, bloated, or poorly worded MVP is only a problem if it’s put forward as the final product. The driving goal behind iterative MVPs is not perfection, rather it is to support the process of learning what needs to be developed for the optimal solution that solves the customer’s problems.

“Unlike a prototype or concept test, an MVP is designed not just to answer product design or technical questions. Its goal is to test fundamental business hypotheses.” – Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

So how might product owners and Agile teams begin to get a handle on defining an MVP? There are several questions the product owner and team can ask of themselves, in light of the product backlog, that may help guide their focus and decisions. (Use of the following term “stakeholders” can mean company executives or external customers.)

Identify the likely set of stakeholders who will be attending the sprint review. What will these stakeholders need to see so that they can offer valuable feedback? What does the team need to show in order to spark the most valuable feedback from the stakeholders?

What expectations have been set for the stakeholders?

Is the distinction clear between what the stakeholders want vs what they need?

Is the distinction clear between high and low value? Is the design cart before the value horse?

What are the top two features or functions the stakeholders will be expecting to see? What value – to the stakeholders – will these features or functions deliver?

Will the identified features or functions provide long term value or do they risk generating significant rework down the road?

Are the identified features or functions leveraging code, content, or UI/UX reuse?

Recognizing an MVP – Less is More

Since an MVP can be almost anything, it is perhaps easier to begin any conversation about MVPs by touching on the elements missing from an MVP.

An MVP is not a quality product. Using any generally accepted definition of “quality” in the marketplace, an MVP will fail on all accounts. Well, on most accounts. The key is to consider relative quality. At the beginning of a sprint, the standards of quality for an MVP are framed by the sprint goals and objectives. If it meets those goals, the team has successfully created a quality MVP. If measured against the external marketplace or the quality expectations of the customer, the MVP will almost assuredly fail inspection.

Your MVPs will probably be ugly, especially at first. They will be missing features. They will be unstable. Build them anyway. Put them in front of the customer for feedback. Learn. And move on to the next MVP. Progressively, they will begin to converge on the final product that is of high quality in the eyes of the customer. MVPs are the stepping stones that get you across the development stream and to the other side where all is sunny, beautiful, and stable. (For more information on avoiding the trap of presupposing what a customer means by quality and value, see “The Value of ‘Good Enough’“)

An MVP is not permanent. Agile teams should expect to throw away several, maybe even many, MVPs on their way to the final product. If they aren’t, then it is probable they are not learning what they need to about what the customer actually wants. In this respect, waste can be a good, even important thing. The driving purpose of the MVP is to rapidly develop the team’s understanding of what the customer needs, the problems they are expecting to have solved, and the level of quality necessary to satisfy each of these goals.

MVPs are not the truth. They are experiments meant to get the team to the truth. By virtue of their low-quality, low-cost nature, MVPs quickly shake out the attributes to the solution the customer cares about and wants. The solid empirical foundation they provide is orders of magnitude more valuable to the Agile team than any amount of speculative strategy planning or theoretical posturing.

Related Posts

On a recent flight into Houston, my plane was diverted to Austin due to weather. Before we could land at Austin, we were re-diverted back to Houston. I’ve no idea why the gears aligned this way, but this meant we were out-of-sequence with the baggage handling system and our luggage didn’t arrive at the claim carousel for close to an hour and a half. Leading up to the luggage arrival was an unfortunate display from an increasingly agitated young couple. They were loudly communicating their frustration to an airport employee with unknown authority. Their frustration was understandable in light of the fact that flights were undoubtedly going to be missed.

At one point, the woman exclaimed, “This isn’t how this is supposed to work!”

I matched this with a similar comment from one of the developers on one of my project teams. Stressed with the workload he had committed to, he declared there are too many meetings and therefore “the agile process is not working!” When explored, it turned out some version of this sentiment was common among the software development staff.

In both cases, the process was working. It just wasn’t working as desired or expected based on past experience. In both cases, present events were immune to expectations. The fact that our luggage almost always shows up on time and that agile frequently goes smoothly belies how susceptible the two processes actually are to unknown variables that can disrupt the usual flow of events.

There is a difference with agile, however. When practiced well, it adapts to the vagaries of human experience. We expect the unexpected, even if we don’t know what form that may take.

There is an assumption being made by the developers in that “working agile” makes work easy and stress free. I’ve never found that. And I don’t know anyone who has. It stresses teams differently than waterfall. I’ve experienced high stress developing code under both agile and waterfall. With agile, however, teams have a better shot at deciding for themselves the stress they want to take on. But there will be stress. Unstressed coders deliver code of questionable value and quality, if they deliver at all.

The more accurate assessment to make here is that the developers aren’t practicing agile as well as they could. That’s fundamentally different from “agile isn’t working.” In particular, the developers didn’t understand what they had committed to. Every single sprint planning session I’ve run (and the way I coach them to be run) begins with challenging the team members to think about things that may impact the work they will commit to in the next sprint – vacations, family obligations, doctor visits, other projects, stubbed toes, alien abductions – anything that may limit the effort they can commit to. What occurred with the developers was a failure to take responsibility for their actions and decisions, a measure of dishonesty (albeit unintended) to themselves and their team mates by saying “yes” to work and later wishing “no.”

Underlying this insight into developer workload may be something much more unsettling. If anyone on your team has committed to more than they can complete and has done so for a number of sprints, your project may be at risk. The safe assumption would be that the project has a hidden fragility that will surprise you when it breaks. Project time lines, deliverables, and quality will suffer not solely because there are too many meetings, but because the team does not have a good understanding of what they need to complete and what they can commit to. What is the potential impact on other projects (internal and client) knowing that one or more of the team members is over committing? What delays, quality issues, or major pivots are looming out there ready to cause significant disruptions?

The resolution to this issue requires time and the following actions:

Coaching for creating and refining story cards

Coaching for understanding how to estimate work efforts (points and/or time)

Develop skills in the development staff for recognizing card dependencies

Develop skills for time management

Find ways to modify the work environment such that it is easier for developers to focus on work for extended periods of time

Evaluate the meeting load to determine if there are extraneous meetings

Based on metrics, specifically limit each developer’s work commitment for several sprints such that it falls within their ability to complete

When my experience with scrum began to transition from developer to scrum master and on to mentor and coach, early frustrations could have been summed up in the phrase, “Why can’t people just follow a simple framework?” The passage of time and considerable experience has greatly informed my understanding of what may inhibit or prevent intelligent and capable people from picking up and applying a straightforward framework like scrum.

At the top of this list of insights has to be the tendency of practitioners to place elaborate decorations around their understanding of scrum. In doing so, they make scrum practices less accessible. The framework itself can make this a challenge. Early on, while serving in the role of mentor, I would introduce scrum with an almost clinical textbook approach: define the terms, describe the process, and show the obligatory recursive work flow diagrams. In short order, I’d be treading water (barely) in endlessly circuitous debates on topics like the differences between epics and stories. I wrote about this phenomenon in a previous post as it relates to story points. So how can we avoid being captured by Parkinson’s law of triviality and other cognitive traps?

Words Matter

I discovered that the word “epic” brought forth fatigue inducing memories of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Shakespeare. Instant block. Solution out of reach. It was like putting a priceless, gold-plated, antique picture frame around the picture postcard of a jackalope your cousin Eddie sent you on his way through Wyoming. Supertanker loads of precious time were wasted in endless debates about whether or not something was an epic or a story. So, no more talk of epics. I started calling them “story categories.” Or “chapters.” Or “story bundles.” Whatever it took to get teams onto the idea that “epics” are just one of the dimensions to a story map or product backlog that helps the product owner and agile delivery team keep a sense of overall project scope. Story writing progress accelerated and teams were doing a decent job of creating “epics” without knowing they had done so. Fine tuning their understanding and use of formal scrum epics came later and with much greater ease.

“Sprint” is another unfortunate word in formal scrum. With few exceptions, the people that have been on my numerous scrum teams haven’t sprinted anywhere in decades. Sprinting is something one watches televised from some far away place every four years. Maybe. Given its fundamental tenets and principles, who’s to say a team can’t find a word for the concept of a “sprint” that makes sense to them. The salient rule, it would seem, is that whatever word they choose, the team fully understand that “it” is a time-boxed commitment for completing a defined set of work tasks. And if “tide,” “phase,” or “iteration” gets the team successfully through a project using scrum than who am I to wear a the badge of “Language Police?”

A good coach meets the novice at their level and then builds their expertise over time, structured in a way that matches and challenges the learner’s capacity to learn. I recall from my early Aikido practice the marked difference between instructors who stressed using the correct Japanese name for a technique over those that focused more on learning the physical techniques and described them in a language I could understand. Once I’d learned the physical patterns the verbal names came much more easily.

Full disclosure: this is not as easy when there are multiple scrum teams in the same organization that eventually rotate team members. Similarly, integrating new hires with scrum experience is much easier when the language is shared. But to start, if the block to familiarization with the scrum process revolves around semantic debates it makes sense to adapt the words so that the team can adopt the process then evolve the words to match more closely those reflected in the scrum framework.

Philosophy, System, Mindset, or Process

A similar fate awaited team members that had latched onto the idea that scrum or agile in general is a philosophy. I watched something similar happen in the late 1980’s when the tools and techniques of total quality management evolved into monolithic world views and corporate religions. More recently, I’ve attended meet-ups where conversations about “What is Agile?” include describing the scrum master as “therapist” or “spiritual guide.” Yikes! That’s some pretty significant mission creep.

I’m certain fields like philosophy and psychotherapy could benefit from many of the principles and practices found in agile. But it would be a significant category error to place agile at the same level as those fields of study. If you think tasking an agile novice with writing an “epic” is daunting, try telling them they will need to study and fully understand the “philosophy of agile” before they become good agile practitioners.

The issue is that it puts the idea of practicing agile essentially out of reach for the new practitioner or business leader thinking about adopting agile. The furthest up this scale I’m willing to push agile is that it is a mindset. An adaptive way of thinking about how work gets done. From this frame I can leverage a wide variety of common, real-life experiences that will help those new to agile understand how it can help them succeed in their work life.

Out in the wild, best to work the system and process angles if you want meaningful work to actually get done.